Defend the ICC
International Criminal Court · act before December 2026
Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed in Gaza, among them children, doctors, and whole families buried under their own homes. In November 2024 the International Criminal Court did the one thing that could still carry consequences. It issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Israel has spent the two years since using American power to take that Court apart. Its judges have been sanctioned, its officials threatened, its chief prosecutor forced out. This December, six ICC judges are elected for nine years. The only thing that has ever protected this Court is the public deciding to watch.
Two minutes · do this first
For two years the pressure has run one way. The Court’s judges have been sanctioned, its staff threatened, its prosecutor forced out. Every delegation voting in December has felt that weight, and almost none of them have felt anything pushing back. Judicial elections are unglamorous and almost never watched, which is exactly the quiet Israel is counting on.
Every state party to the Rome Statute is legally obliged to execute the arrest warrants. Whether that obligation survives is what December decides.
What the warrants are for
The Court had never before charged the leadership of a Western-allied state. Pre-Trial Chamber I did it unanimously, and rejected Israel’s challenge to its jurisdiction unanimously as well.
War crimes
Crimes against humanity
Said out loud
Efforts to bring the International Criminal Court “to heel” were intended to “defend Bibi and various other people.”
Pressure on international courts is normally deniable. It runs through funding, access and quiet diplomacy, and it is always called something else. Not this time. The stated purpose of an American sanctions programme was the protection of one indicted foreign leader. There is no reading of that sentence in which the Court’s independence is not the target.
The takedown
Israel has not needed to abolish the Court. It has only needed to make the personal cost of doing the job unbearable for the people who hold the offices, and it has used American power to do it.
Judges unanimously reject Israel’s jurisdictional challenges and issue arrest warrants for war crimes and crimes against humanity. It was the first time the ICC had charged the leadership of a Western-allied state.
Executive Order 14203 puts the Court under US sanctions. Later rounds name sitting judges and deputy prosecutors personally. Their bank accounts were frozen, their cards cancelled, and they were locked out of the global financial system. Judges were punished for the content of their rulings, in defence of a foreign prime minister, and Washington said so openly.
In March a three-judge panel concludes unanimously that the findings against Prosecutor Karim Khan do not establish misconduct or breach of duty. In April a majority of the Assembly’s Bureau votes to disregard that conclusion. In July, states parties remove him by secret ballot, eleven days after the US Secretary of State said Washington would “dismantle the ICC — brick by brick, if necessary.”
Six judges, nine-year terms to 2036, elected by the same states that have spent two years deciding how much American pressure they are willing to absorb. This is the step that is not finished. It is the only one still open to us.
The precedent
The strength of the international human rights and justice systems depends precisely on their universality — on the principle that they apply equally, or to no one.
01
If the Court reaches only the weak, its record stops reading as justice and starts reading as selection. Every defendant it ever convicted acquires, free of charge, the defence they always claimed: that they were prosecuted because they could be.
02
Sanctions from a non-member state are an attack from outside. Member states declining to say plainly that these warrants bind them is worse: it establishes that Rome Statute obligations are negotiable when the accused is well-connected. That is then available to everyone.
03
The system asks states to accept binding constraints in exchange for an order that applies to everyone. If its most visible test resolves in favour of power, the UN loses more than a case. It loses the argument, and it loses it to everyone who always said the rules were written by the strong for use against the weak.
04
The ICC is the only permanent court with jurisdiction to try a sitting head of government for these crimes. No higher body hears an appeal from it, and no successor institution is being built. If it is broken here, it stays broken for the next Gaza, and the one after that.
Israel does not need the Court abolished. It needs December’s vote to pass quietly: six judges chosen with nobody watching.
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